Link Banana

The thought had never really occurred to me, but it turns most of those really cool pictures from space are Photoshopped (that word looks ugly any way you write it).

An object that would in real life comprise several indistinguishable shades of red might be represented to the public as the composite of three pictures in red, green, and blue. As a general rule, professional “visualizers” try to assign red to the image showing the longest wavelengths of light and blue to the one showing the shortest.

Kottke’s right: this video of one of Jupiter’s moons, as taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, looks like (fairly marginal) CGI.

Neatorama points to some interesting maps. Basically: the total area of the moon covered by the Apollo 11 astronauts was smaller than a soccer field. Or, if they landed on a baseball diamond, they hardly left the infield.

A picture of the International Space Station transiting the sun. It’s like a mini solar eclipse.

(via Wired Science)

I’m pretty sure this is at least the third time this week, but I can’t help myself. The Big Picture’s series on Jupiter is quite awesome.

Announced with less than a tenth the fanfare of the ice on Mars, scientists now believe there is water on the moon. Add this to the near-invisible announcement of water in Mercury’s atmosphere, and it’s beginning to look like water’s far more prevalent in the solar system than we’d thought.

For The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook will try to scare you about how astroids will kill us. The title links to the video (because I have “reader’s block”), but the text of the story is also online.

• Because they give us pictures like this.
• And also some like this.

(both via kottke)

Though I have no idea what these photos are doing on a forum called “BMWSportTouring,” there’s no denying that they’re very cool. They show how the space shuttle is assembled, from the hauling in of parts to liftoff. Well worth a look.

(via kottke)